Luis Fernando Chaves
School of Public Health
Expert Bio
Luis Fernando Chaves is an associate professor in the IU School of Public Health-Bloomington Department of Environmental and Occupational Health. He has been studying insect vectors and the diseases they transmit since he was an undergraduate in Venezuela.
Before coming to Indiana, he was an associate researcher and external consultant at Instituto Conmemorativo Gorgas de Estudios de la Salud (Gorgas Memorial Research Institute) in Panamá; external faculty of the Entomology Masters at Universidad de Panamá; a senior researcher at INCIENSA (Costa Rican Institute for Research and Training on Health and Nutrition) in Costa Rica; and an assistant professor at the Nagasaki University Institute of Tropical Medicine in Japan. He had postdoctoral training on the mathematical modeling of coupled natural and social systems at Hokkaido University as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow and in vector ecology and environmental studies at Emory University, where he was a member of the NIH-RAPIDD (Research and Policy on Infectious Disease Dynamics) group on vector-borne diseases.
He has directed research projects in Costa Rica, Panamá, USA, Venezuela and Japan, and he has collaborated in projects based in Canada, Brazil, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Taiwan, Korea, Vanuatu and Kenya, among other places. Research results have been published in over 120 papers mainly focused on insect vectors, vector-borne diseases and other diseases sensitive to environmental change.
Areas of Expertise
GIS and remote sensing, vector-borne, zoonotic and neglected tropical diseases, food systems and Health, applied data science, climate change impacts on health.